The Geodetic Excursion of TUM advanced Bachelor and early Master Geodesy students took place from 9-12 June 2026 and was jointly organized by DGFI-TUM (Prof. Florian Seitz, Dr. Felix L. Müller) and TUM-RSA (Prof. Katharina Anders). We visited several organizations and projects that gave us insight into their work related to geodetic techniques and applications. Excursion stops included:

Rockfall Monitoring at Vals: Patrick Fritzmann from Land Tirol met with us at a site experiencing a massive rockfall in 2017 and since then being heavily monitored by different geodetic techniques. Among fissometers and automatic tachymeter measurements, it is one of the primary development sites of permanent terrestrial laser scanning systems.

Brenner Base Tunnel: We visited the construction site of this major Austrian-Italian tunnel project with an interesting talk about the geodetic calculations required. Only thanks to sophisticated geodetic considerations, the tunneling from the South and North met with an error of only 2-5 cm! Afterwards, we had the opportunity to enter the tunnel construction and exploratory tunnel and got a first-hand impression of the size and effort the construction requires.

AltoDrones: In the beautiful setting of Museion in Bozen, Florian Fink of AltoDrones provided us interesting insights into the projects of their airborne laser scanning survey company with a great variety of applications and users, as well as advanced technologies with helicopter acquisitions and topo-bathymetric sensors.

Eurac Research: At this private research center in Bozen, Dr. Claudia Notarnicola, head of the Institute for Earth Observation, hosted us with an afternoon of exciting research activities of Earth observation in high-mountain applications. Two researchers presented their work on glacier monitoring and permafrost observation with comprehensive data sources and analysis approaches, as required for these comprehensive topics.

Pasterze Glacier: Via the high-alpine road at Großglockner, we arrived at the visitor center Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe overlooking Pasterze glacier. A small hike and guided tour gave us impressionable input on the landscape changes experienced in this glacier landscape - a direct connection to the Earth observation work presented at EURAC.

Moserboden Stausee: As a final stop, we reached Zell am See / Kaprun and visited the high-mountain reservoir operated as one of the major storage power plants in Austria. This large, multi-level reservoir was constructed since the early 20th century and until today demonstrates the importance of precise and robust engineering capabilities.

We are thankful to all persons and organizations welcoming us and highly appreciate the time taken to present their work and answer the group's questions! 

We are also grateful to TUM School of Enginnering and Design, Department of Aerospace and Geodesy, for sponsoring the excursion in the frame of Tuition Substitution Funds.